Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Liveries Part III: Image Contracts

The livery system I described in my previous blog entry (proposed independently by several users) would imply a contract between the aircarft creator and livery creator. The way I look at it:

The livery creator agrees to utilize the texture conventions established by the aircraft modeler.

The aircraft modeler recognizes that changes in the fundamental texturing scheme of the airplane become much more "expensive" because they potentially invalidate a whole set of liveries.

This is an exceptional situation in X-Plane...we have avoided contracts regarding the layout of images in all previous cases. (Examples: you can't use the library to replace an OBJ's texture. You specify terrain via a text file that references the image file, not the image file itself, so information on how to use the texture isn't part of the contract.)

But in the case of liveries, I think the exception is the inevitable outcome - a livery quite literally is a repainting of an aircraft, and the X-Plane community has been living with the limits of this kind of add-on for a while.

What this means is that it would be appropriate to override object textures in a livery system, but this feature is unlikely to appear anywhere else in the sim.